Identity Theft

Today was my first full day in Seattle. It was a long but varied day. It has suddenly hit me that I am one hour away from midnight, west coast time, which is nearly 2 a.m. in New York. After a full day of feeling like I was back home on the West Coast, my body is suddenly deciding to remind me that it now resides on the East Coast.

I began my journey into a poetics of place with a day in the International District. The choice of locale was dictated by plans to meet two very old friends -- by old, I mean, back from my undergraduate years at Northwestern in the early 1980s (before hip-hop had gotten going) -- for lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in town. Walking from my hotel on the eastern edge of a neighborhood known as First Hill took me into the area in about 15 minutes. If you follow the logic of geography that Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest dictates, you will soon learn that the logic ends once you've crossed the last J, or Jefferson. From there, the main east-west arteries become Yesler, Jackson, King, and then Dearborn.

The International District sits roughly between Yesler and Dearborn. At one point in its history, it ran all the way to Puget Sound, but land appropriated to build sports stadiums beginning in the early 1970s, sandwiched the district to a space between Fourth Avenue (more or less) and 15th (more or less).

Within those 11 north-south avenues are neighborhoods within neighborhoods: a section called Little Saigon and an area known as Chinatown. I am not sure where the City of Seattle has designated that the boundaries of these areas begin and end. I just know that the neighborhoods exist. A visit to the Wing Luke Museum, which has moved to a beautiful new site on King Street, between Seventh and Eighth, helped me understand the political logic of how these neighborhoods came to be formed through waves of migration that began first in the mid-1880s with Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Indian laborers and continued into the present era, with moments like the initial arrival of Vietnamese refugees and then Cambodians helping to form the most recent neighborhoods.

The Wing Luke Museum calls itself a national model for how museums and communities can work together to capture history and mobilize it to gain better understandings of the present. One of its strongest features (from the perspective of someone who can only be a passive recipient of information for a few minutes) is the interactivity it deploys in many of its exhibits, a feature that nudges participants to become players in the process of making history. It is perhaps no coincidence that Seattle's world renowned b-boy crew The Massive Monkees have a studio across the street and a bit further down the block from Wing Luke, and that the front desk attendant at the museum told me that they had had an exhibit recently on Asian American hip-hop. Interactivity is integral to hip-hop, with emcees and deejays in their own ways issuing calls to an audience, hoping (and usually getting) a resounding response.

"Don't put your name in there; that's wrong."

The rebuke, delivered by a woman who appeared to be of Asian descent, jolted my thoughts out of reflection. A grandmother was scolding her grandson for taking part in an identity project, which is one of the interactive aspects of the museum's current exhibit on Talking About Race. Just as the Words Beats & LIfe teach-in emphasized the numerous ways that Africans brought to the Americas as slaves and their American-born descendants on plantations had been stripped of their identities, Wing Luke's exhibits detail how the process of scrutinizing incoming immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries often resulted in a loss of a sense of self on the part of Asian immigrants and their children. The exhibit curators then introduced their own identity reclamation project: a computer program that allows you to take a picture of yourself that is then printed onto an identity card, with certain categories that you yourself can fill out.

The grandson tried to claim his identity, and was scolded for inserting his name into the computer and then for behaving in a way that "was not very Asian." I cannot detail the full account of what he tried to do because several family members of this particular grandmother and grandson were at the museum together, and I was trying very hard not to invade their privacy, even as their conversation had entered my space.

What struck me about what I did hear, however, was an odd dilemma. The grandmother's rebuke seemed to revolve around her sense of what should be private and what was appropriate to reveal. Real names, and real histories -- with dates of birth, or dates of significant milestones in life -- were private and "un-Asian" to reveal. You could share but only in a partial sense. Hold back who you really are.

The grandson who seemed to be about ten or eleven years old defended himself well. He declared that he was only trying to input the person he thought he really was, the person who existed under the skin, the core essence of his humanity. He was not worried about revealing himself and opening up a prospect of identity theft. He wanted to self-express.

I badly wanted to intervene. I wanted to tell the grandmother that the computer program was creating a history of the twenty-first century that was centered not on documentation of big media moments but on the micro-dynamics of lived experience. I wanted to add that her grandson's identity was his story, and that by sharing his story, he was weaving it into a social fabric that had often lacked the perspectives of Asians, Pacific Islanders, Latinos, African Americans, and Europeans who had sacrificed key markers of their ethnic distinctiveness in order to pass for white, the necessary prerequisite from 1795 to 1965 for U.S. citizenship. He was like the graffiti writers who threw their names, their colors and their artistic ingenuity up onto New York City subway trains in the 1970s. He was declaring that he existed and deserved to be accounted for.

I held back. Perhaps it was shyness. More, it was a sense that this was a family matter that might have understandings that would not make sense to a complete stranger. But I did make sure before I left the museum to sit down at the computer, have my picture taken, and fill out my own identity card.

What was my skin? The computer asked.

I replied, "Brown."

Who are you under your skin? The computer asked.

"Brown," I replied. "Being brown creates my lens for the world."

I took some time, too, to scroll through other identity cards that museum visitors had created. I appreciated the wall of self-ness pulled together into collectivity that this particular aspect of 21st century technology had produced. Collectively, the contributors created a graffiti wall that demands to be noticed. Like graffiti, it was renegade and cutting edge.

As I left the exhibit to visit the rest of the museum, I noticed a community bulletin board near the stairwell. Children were being offered free paint -- in the shades of white, gray, and blue -- to help eradicate graffiti. It seemed so ironic. An exhibit invites participants to call out their uniqueness. A community notice encourages them to paint over and eradicate the expressions of those who in real life answered the call.